Writing Diatribes

It’s finally happened! Otherworldly Discipline had been taken down a few months ago by the old publisher as I now have the rights, so we gave Book One a facelift! SNP edited the living hell out of it, made me clean up a bunch of stuff, but it’s still the same old story, and now we’re ready for book two! This will be coming out in a few short weeks, once sales from Her Masters Claim peter down a bit. It’s ready to go!

Her Master’s Hand starts twenty years after the cliff-hanger of Book One. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean much. They’re immortal, so nobody’s aged yet except for Moriarty’s small brood of kids, which make an appearance. It turns into an identity story, where hopefully our little witch finally comes to respect and value what she is, and what she has, especially after spending her years under the guardianship of a extremely strict demigod.

Haven’t read Her Master’s Claim yet? Get a copy before the long-awaited sequel finally pops in!

Commanding The Princess

31,000/31,000Completed

Going through final revisions.

Commanding the Princess is a medieval novella that will be sold in a Medieval collection along with works from Renee Rose, Sue Lyndon, Ashe Barker, and Dinah McLeod. They are all stand-alone novels but plots are within the same time and place. The book will also be up for sale individually. Series will be released February 2015.

Susanna, a Princess Regent, has had her kingdom sacked by the Holy Roman Empire, and pleads for mercy for her remaining citizens from the mercenary-turned-commander, Gerhard. Unfortunately for her, Gerhard has to turn her in to the Emperor to be tried for her life… but unfortunately for Gerhard–he was in love with the saucy royal at first sight. Could these enemies find love together? Or just a night of passion before Susanna’s world comes to a tragic end?

Keeping Their Baby (Being Their Baby Sequel)

28,000/80,000Words

A sequel to Being Their Baby that takes place five weeks after the last book ended, we find the Hobbes family go through new challenges. Josh is trying to forge a perminant relationship with Sophie, Charlie and Liz have to plan a wedding, and Sophie gets up to her eyeballs in trouble. This book will include an F/M scene as well as plenty of three-some sex, anal play, tons of spanking and humiliation, and enough eroticism to make your eyes bulge.

Being Her Daddy

5,000/50,000Words

Although there’s a similar title in use, this is not part of my Being Their Baby collection. Being Her Daddy is a contemporary DD & Ageplay romance between a contemporary heterosexual couple. You’ll see tons of sex, anal play, spanking, and humiliation play galore. My husband James is leading this project, and I’m excited to be writing a book side by side with him. He’s fantastic.

Otherworldly Discipline, Two

914,000/914,000Completed

Going through final revisions.

Should be out before Valentine’s day. I’ve had to rewrite a few chapters and characters with my editor’s suggestions, which has been extremely tough since I’m surrounded by deadlines left and right. I’m hoping to have the edits done in a couple of days, however.

As for the plot–this picks up 2 decades after the end of Otherworldly Discipline, Book One. Although Charlotte’s survived, she’s taken in by a demigod who keeps her as a childlike pet, all while Ashcroft has descended into depression and has taken to walking through the Otherworld as a wandering wizard while Moriarty’s family has taken control of the tower. When Moriarty’s children get kidnapped and Charlotte (called Maili) tries to escape a new, abusive husband, lives get thrown into turmoil. With old enemies charging towards them with a whole army, can the ill-fated group survive all the obstacles ahead of them, and can things ever be as they were?

Billionaire’s Babygirl

30,000/60,000Words

Russian billionaires Braum Vetter and Jakob Brunner have developed one of the most advanced computer anti-hacking programs in the world, and always on their tails are blackhat hackers that want to take them down. Jacey Cameron is a young sauvant who has been in the underworld since an early age, and who’s always on the run from her own demons. When she’s blackmailed by one of her enemies to infiltrate Jakob Brunner’s personal harddrive, she might find herself way in over her head. Seducing Jakob seems impossible by itself, but as the man is interested in ageplay and erotic humiliation play, she wonders how far she has to go, especially as she starts loving the two billionaires who care for her.

So, all of you who are reading this and didn’t write me off completely can now welcome me back to the universe.

I feel like I just had a baby. I’m tired, I’m relieved, and I’m happy. Although I kept saying I was close–and I was–to done with the novel I finally finished up the last 20 thousand words to make this a done-bun. Now, it’s off to the editor so she can tell me what I’ve done wrong and then I’ll fix that, and then it’s out. Series complete!

Looking back, I don’t know why it was so hard. It was almost as if I kept finding the right path and then kept veering off the wrong way. I’d rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and would constantly change my opinion as to where I wanted the story to go. Back in late February I sat down and wrote the entire plot of the book, and I more or less stayed with that outline, although the characters sometimes needed to be stabbed back into what was expected from them. There were a lot of challenging scenes to write, and the plot has twists and turns that I needed to make sure it weaved back out of.

Hopefully those excuses work, because I’m stuck, other than that. I probably wrote a million words down and only have 93 thou to show you for the effort. I am glad you’re patient and have stuck with it! Expect the book to come out soon, as well as WAY more posts, since I was not cleared to do much of anything the last few months except get Otherworldly Discipline, 2 done outside of my regular Stormy Night work.

Alright, so I got tagged by a couple of people in a little facebook sort of chain letter that was really cool. The idea was this: list 10 books that impacted you in some way. You weren’t supposed to think very hard on this, but let’s face it, I spent the next week wondering what I’d put on my list. The idea on facebook is that you didn’t have to explain why certain books made your list, you just listed them out and let people read into it what they will. Anyway, thank you so much for tagging me, Constance Masters (and Mary Sue Wehr for putting me on your list, as well. You two gals are the sweetest things, and I’m so flattered that you mentioned my books)!

Anywhoo, I didn’t want to do a facebook post on this without an explanation (because then it’d be a LONG status update), because it made me flashback to college when everybody was claiming their favorite book was “Dante’s Inferno” in this name-excessive on the first day. When it came to me, I said, “My name is Korey and–without a doubt–The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” People bawked and started laughing and I shrugged and leaned back, continuing, “Well, really just up to the forth. For some reason ‘Mostly Human’ was hard to get through. I think Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy stood above the rest…” People thought I was an idiot for a couple of days for it. One’s favorite book is a very personal thing that I think says a lot about someone, but the reason behind why someone likes a particular book can’t be lost to translation.

Anyway, Natasha Knight is way smarter than me, because obviously she was thinking the same thing (about wanting to explain her list, for some reason HGTTG didn’t make her list, but I like to think that’s because she hasn’t read it yet…) Anyway, Natasha had the idea of not just making a facebook post, but making it a whole blog post. So, as you can see, I’m totally stealing her idea. She’s pretty cool though, so I think she’ll forgive me for blatantly copying her. 😉

And because I never use 5 words when I could use 50, mine’s super-duper long. Sorry ’bout that. 😉

This was one of those books that my mother gave me, hoping to turn me into a feminist warrior princess. I have to say, that no other children’s book hit me that hard. It was great, I liked it, it does have a feminist message, but it was there that I understood what I wanted in a man. From there, I knew how to write book heroes. I also knew that the best female heroines are strong, savy, but they can be multi-layered. Anyway; strangely it taught me a lot about characterization at a young age–which was handy because I was already writing books and fan-fictions since I was five–but it also taught me that men are supposed to value, respect, and honor a woman, and fuck them if they don’t.

This book mostly taught me about high-jinks and putting blatant sarcasm into any novel and it go over well. Huckleberry Finn didn’t strike me the same way, because it’s not my writing style. I find first-person narrative to be extremely, extremely difficult. The third-person narrative with a sense of humor, though, I can get behind and always try to emulate.

This is the type of book that makes you need to change your pants. It’s so beyond the skill level of anyone who’s lived in the last three-hundred years that it’s like it was written by a supernatural being. That being said, I wrote all over my edition, and that’s even when my copy had 1 inch of text and 10 inches of footers under it. It actually helped me back on course in my personal religious journey. I found it was the first time my puny mind could even pin-prick the idea of the omniscient, and the idea of God’s love and sacrifice and relationship towards us as his creation, and giving even Lucifer a strange sort of role that made you somewhat understand how evil could have been born in the world. I’m not saying I believe it verbatim or anything, but it’s a book that made me consider the fact that I might not know shit from shinola about anything. I had to question everything. It nearly made my brain explode. This book is a masterpiece.

This is one of those books that I liked, then I hated, then I loved, all through the coarse of the first-reading of it. I actually had to read this as an assignment when I was fifteen, and it’s the first book that I read where I read a line that made me stand up, scream, “Holy Shit!” and the run through the house, wondering where my sanity went. I felt like Charles Dickens himself came up about 4/5ths of the way through the book and hit me with a cricket bat. I mean, the story and character weaving is on a whole different level! It seemed too complex to get, and then everything just fell beautifully into place, and it was just jaw-dropping.

Call it tripe if you wish–I know I keep calling it trip, myself–but I keep re-reading the book over and over and over. There’s head-hoping, the plotting’s a little sloppy, but damn it, does she (Jane Austin) know how to write characters. They don’t do a whole lot in the book except chat and drink tea, and I still love the hell out of it. It’s funny, sarcastic, but utterly wonderful. I love happy-sighing when I’m reading.

I’ve re-read this every five years or so. I know, it might seem like a random choice, but hear me out–I love being fed random facts about science, history, nature, or anything else, while still being delighted with a fast-moving plot, excellent characters with great dynamics, witty banter, great villains, all by an author with great imagination. It’s like eating candy while it still being good for you. It gives me excellent brain-fodder and also sparks my desire to go out and learn and research new things. That, and I like Ian Malcolm. A lot.

You might have known this one was coming. I could really wax poetic about Douglas Adams all day long, but here’s the gist–the guy is like the superman of English sarcasm. Sometimes he makes me laugh so hard I feel like I’m gonna pee. That being said, my fascination goes deeper than that–he makes delicious characters and humorous dialogue in his characters, but his narrator’s always second to none. Dirk Gently and the Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is also fabulous. He has great pacing, fantastic imagination, and puts a million one-liner jokes in every book. I feel he showed me the way when it comes to dialogue… Not that I’m anywhere in the ballpark, but I’d REALLY like to be in that ballpark before I die.

I haven’t read this in a long time, but I remember how deeply it touched me when I read it. This was another assignment-read, I grant you, but I’m glad he assigned it. It was part of this unit on existentialism, and I think a companion read to this would be Camus’ essay on The Myth of Sisyphus which basically says the same thing without putting its reader into a depression. Essentially it’s about this complete sociopath that can’t feel attachment to anyone–he is an innocent product of the world who can only feel with his body; he doesn’t seem to care about anything or have a soul. What got me crying for two days straight is that at the end of the book, I felt like the loss of hope was the loss of existence. Hope is the guiding light of everybody’s life. Hope is what presses us forward… Anyway, it really touched me to the bottom of my heart and I was filled with so much compassion for him. It sort of changed the way I view people and how I judge people as well.

I know what you’re thinking: “You can’t put a whole series in there, Korey. Jesus! Didn’t you get the assignment?” Firstly, I’m already cheating. Secondly, you can’t just put one book. Patrick O’Brien does not write plots, per se. He writes life. I feel like he has the ability to transport me back into time, turns me into a fly, and sticks me to a wall. The conversations are so real. There’s a lot of adventure, but the novels sort of flow one into the next without any real climax or resolution. It’s just history, and people, and how they sometimes pass in and out of one’s lives, sometimes dying or sometimes going through massive heartbreak or elation. Reading it was almost an out-of-body experience; it’s hard to explain, but I really got into these and all the amazing historical details of living through the Napoleonic wars. Most of all…. I likes me a bro-mance.

Now, Mere Christianity basically rocked my world after college and helped round off my actually being a Christian, so that’s big. But nearly two decades before that point, I read this as a kid and, even though I was really young, the Christian symbolism wasn’t lost on me. I was about four when this book was read to me when I was a kid, and the notion of self-sacrifice was a huge thing to me. It pressed upon me notions of forgiveness and all that. Now, I appreciate it for it’s exceptional story-telling. This is not a long book, but I always feel so attached to the characters. It’s just down-and-dirty good-verse-evil stuff with excellent themes that still get me thinking to this day. If only I could make an allegory like that. Also, it was obvious that Lewis was making a Christian allegory, but I feel he did it without being exhausting or beating anyone over the head. I see a lot of people try to write allegories or make important points in books, and it sounds like nagging. CS new his stuff. That being said, the rest of the series was horrible.

I know, I know, there’s no spanking stories on the list. Certainly, I read a lot of them, and I re-read and re-read again some of them. Some of them will arouse me, tantalize, excite, even change my outlook on sexuality a bit and get me curious to read more. Darla Phelps got me interested in Ageplay with ‘The Pets Series”, Laura Smith got me into threesomes with “The Sam McGee” series. So many authors in the spanking genre are beyond fabulous, and so many of them have also structured the way I write and the way I look at things. I think I chose these books because they opened my eyes, made huge adjustments to my writing style, and sometimes impacted my soul, lifestyle, or the way I saw the universe, or how I live my life.

Don’t worry. I haven’t stopped writing my Ageplay NOR have I stopped plotting out Otherworldly Discipline, Book Two. Everything is as scheduled.

I thought you guys would get a hoot out of this. Remember, for every book I write, I have dozens of other versions of the final product that never saw the light of day, nor are they likely to.

When I was eighteen, although I’d written some Newsie fanfics–I couldn’t help myself, Newsies came out when I was seven so it was very age-appropriate for me to do at the time–I lamented that I would never finish a novel. I worried that I was under some sort of Greek-like hell-sentence where I was doomed to rework the first five chapters of a story over and over again and never see anything finished.

Obviously, I’m fine now. I can finish books okay, it’s just the hard part of my job, that’s all. After I finish a book I tend to spend a couple of weeks trying out new writing methods or a new style, or even a new way of story-telling or a really dramatic plot that I never plan to finish because of complexity, etc.

This is the first chapter of my FIRST rendition of Otherworldly Discipline. There’s actually a chapter two written as well, but to get that, I’m going to need 10 comments from you guys. So if you want more… You need to let me know. I’m trying to test this out so you all don’t get sick of me cluttering up your email boxes with my rough-drafts.

Alright, now to start off: The plot’s different. Otherworldly Discipline was refined away from this:

In this rendition, hundreds of years ago there was a really bloody wizarding war. Ashcroft led one side, and Lachlan ran the other. Lachlan was winning the war, and so Ashcroft sealed the entrance to the Otherworld away from the Earthside, trapping Lachlan and his evil legions on one side, and trapping Ashcroft in the Otherworld. The two realms are separates by a mystical river (called “The Gates”) that both sides are able to enter, but let’s just say neither Lachlan or Ashcroft could completely cross to the opposite sides.

Charlotte’s creation was ordered by Caden (under Caden–that’s what Lachland was originally named before I got a wild hair up my ass to change it) to have two specific servants to come together and boast a child who could break down the gates back into the Otherworld where he can recharge a lot of his powers and let out the Otherworldly creatures on Earthside and continue to try to reclaim power. Caden would just need to have sex with her and temporary have the power to get into the Otherworld.

Her parents got cold-feet after she was born, and instead of letting Caden wait until she was big enough for him to use essentially like a sex-slave, they ran with her and was in hiding all her childhood, moving place to place to keep her hidden. Eventually they were found and killed. Charlotte got away and has been trying to eke out an existence as a nurse while trying to keep herself hidden, happy, and comfortable while she’s trying to hide from Caden.

If she marries Ashcroft, the magical connection would allow her to go into the Otherworld and him to go onto Earthside once more–Ashcroft had created a magic ring that she only has to put on a particular finger of hers for him to have this connection with her. But Charlotte’s hesitant to A) marry him, of course and B) Let Ashcroft out of his cage which would restart the wizarding war… Which would be much more dangerous to people than it was four-hundred years ago when the Earthside wasn’t quite so complicated.

See what I mean? Complicated. 😉 Enjoy… if you dare to delve into my roughest work…

CHAPTER ONE

Charlotte fancied herself a horrible witch, but now she was beginning to realize she was also a horrible negotiator. She was cold—she had been standing in river water up to her knees for nearly three hours now, hoping to find someone who’d trade with her.

And the only person; or rather, thing that showed up at all was Moriarty, who’s amused wolf eyes studied her as she shivered.

She was not so amused. She slammed her foot down, causing the river water to splash. “You’ve gotta be kidding me!” she cried, angry and incredulous.

Moriarty, who loved being the bearer of bad news for his master, grinned, exposing his perfectly white fangs. “Master Ashcroft said if you don’t trade with him, you can’t trade at all,” Moriarty repeated, lowering his head to continue watching her reaction.

Her dark eyebrows nearly knitted together as she glared at him. “Then why did you come at all?” she growled, annoyed.

“I certainly didn’t want to,” Moriarty admitted with a singular, loud laugh. “Master Ashcroft sent me to tell you. He didn’t want you to get blisters on your poor, bare little tootsies while you were out here all day, wondering where everyone was.”

She didn’t seem to care for the sentiment. She wiped away the goose bumps that were developing on her forearms. “You are such a fucking butt-munch, Mutt. Why don’t you go back to your master and ask for a belly rub?” she mocked acidly, hoping to sting him.

She knew Moriarty didn’t like to be referred to as a common mongrel—he was once a very feared werewolf in his day. Even now, at his most-human, he might be scary to the common human with his claws, teeth, and eyes. Still, there was never anything particularly frightening about him as far as Charlotte was concerned. Probably because he dressed like he was on his way to a Northwest coffee bar in his dark fedora hat and matching trench coat.

He just grinned at her as if he was excited by her feistiness. “Hey, I’m not the idiot who tried to steal from him the last time, Sugar Boots,” he reminded with a look of gratification. “You got what you deserved.”

She blushed furiously, realizing that Moriarty—the most annoying creature she had ever come across anywhere—was perfectly aware of her shame. He knew that Ashcroft spanked her two weeks ago… Spanked her like a goddamn five-year-old who stole a cookie from a forbidden jar.

“He charges too high,” she defended, her teeth gritted.

“And I bet he spanks real hard, too…” he mocked. He laughed at her increasingly upset reaction. If looks could kill, he would be six feet under and properly buried already. “I would have done anything to have seen it.”

She swallowed hard, hating the bullying. She wasn’t used to it—she never lived in a place long enough to acquire real friends or any enemies at all, which she realized left her a little thin-skinned. Maybe that’s why it hurt so much when she realized that Ashcroft wasn’t quite the friend she thought he was.

Of course, he probably thought the same thing about her by now. She hadn’t realized what a show-stopper stealing from Ashcroft was going to be, or the look she would receive when he had discovered that she stole the Elixer of Polaris without his knowledge. Truth be told, she had already inwardly celebrated getting away with it. But then he shot her that look, and she knew that he’d realized what she’d done, and fear had struck through her body clear to the bone.

Her first notion was to get her ass as far away from him as possible. Ashcroft was a powerful Master Wizard—she didn’t want to see him display his talents. And he was absolutely the most frightening man she had ever met—the left side of his face was very, very badly scarred from some sort of wizarding battle years ago. Almost as if a tiger had attacked him, but was careful not to hurt the right side—that side of him was so frightening that all she did was shake and quiver when she first met him. And then, with his eyes blazing wildly, she feared him anew.

All she had had to do was make it to her bank of the Gates River. The Gates was shallow—only ankle-deep in their regular meeting place. She was nearly frightened enough of him to want to just run across the surface of the water like they do in cartoon movies.

As some as you know, Moriarty wasn’t always part fox; he used to be a werewolf, and was very self-conscious about it.. So even though he’s giving me all sorts of shit about me not finishing my book yet, I just want everyone to know that if I left it like this, the dog-jokes would have never stopped. 😉

But he was fast… Very, very unnaturally fast, and grabbed her wrist from behind. The sudden launch had sent her face-first into the river. She gasped when he jerked her back into standing, now looking like a drenched alley cat.

For a moment, she was certain he looked guilty for her fall. He cursed under his breath as he firmly pulled her over to a boulder that they usually met at. It jutted quite far out of the river, well enough to sit upon. “Damned idiot,” he grumbled, furious.

“Look, Ashcroft, let’s be rational about this…” she begged, not knowing what he planned to do with her but quite certain it was going to be some sort of punishment. Even him searching her body for the stolen vial was going to be a humiliating violation.

Unfortunately for her, Ashcroft had not been in the mood to be ‘rational’. Just as she was trying to wring the water out of her sleeve, Ashcroft unbuttoned and unzipped the front of her pants. He was already completed in the task before she realized that he was stripping her. She grabbed his hands, scrunching her body forward so he wouldn’t see her exposed underwear, but it wasn’t much of a wrestling match. He easily was able to free his hands enough, and when he did, he yanked her pants clear down to her knees, leaving her to only cover her front before she was tossed over his knees.

She cried out wordlessly, trying to push herself back into standing, but he had a good, firm arm around her waist, and had suddenly become aware that Ashcroft was in charge, and she was at his mercy.

And then the spanking had commenced. Ashcroft’s hands she had never really given a thought to before that moment. Now all sorts of opinions about them were flying into her head: big, calloused, firm, hard, and uninvited, but slapping down on her exposed rear end firmly, causing her to completely lose her breath.

Even though her body had been very wet, her mouth and throat had suddenly felt very dry as she screamed, “OWE! WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME?”

He didn’t answer, but she figured it out quick enough. He was spanking her, and he was good at it. She had only seen spankings in mainstream movies when growing up—maybe a couple of swats on the rear-end during Little House on the Prairie. Now she was actually experiencing one, to her indignity. She was shivering and crying at the same time, trying to get a full sentence out, but her brain went numb with all the humiliation. “Please, please!” she begged finally, her throat hurt as her eyes began to swell up with tears. “I’m so sorry!”

“Damn right you’re sorry. You’re gonna be a whole lot sorrier before we’re through here, little girl!” he had muttered back angrily over her cries. “You’re lucky I haven’t taken off my belt and strapped you raw! I give you everything you’ve ever asked for, and you repay me with trickery, falseness, thievery… You stole from me while looking me in the eye!”

She had wondered if him taking off his belt and strapping her raw would feel any different from what he was doing. She didn’t know if her bottom could be in any more pain; she had to be at a sort of threshold. He poor posterior was already throbbing—his hand felt like a dozen bee stings. She made another move to try to scramble off of his knee, but he held her firmly and pinned back her arms to the small of her back, trapping all of her movements. “Please don’t torture me, Ash! I’m sorry. Don’t kill me!”

“I’m giving your naughty hide a good tanning, Girl, one you’ve needed for quite awhile!” he had corrected grimly. His voice was brackish, booming. It was somehow louder than the echoing slap on her poor red flanks or her breathy, frantic sobs. “Next time you steal from me, you’d better her away with it. If I catch you again, you won’t sit down for a year. You hear me, Charlotte?”

She had cried in the affirmative—she heard him loud and clear. But he still spanked her, on and on… She was blind with tears in no time, sobbing like a lost child.

Finally, just when she figured it never would, it ended. As soon as he let her arms go, she used every last ounce of energy left in her and scrambled away from him, pulling her pants up more quickly than she had ever done before, terrified that he would see any more of her skin.

She wiped her eyes against her sleeve just so she could see through the tears, and saw that his hand was extended expectantly, open-palmed.

She had reached quickly into her pocket and pulled out the stolen vial, slapping it into his hand so quickly it was as if she was afraid his hand would bite her. His fingers closed up around the vial and he slowly, gently placed it into the satchel handing on his waist. Unlike her, Ashcroft looked very calm.

“Hopefully we learned something today?” he had said simply like a wearied school teacher.

“I hate you,” she had hissed, her eyes beat red and puffy as she wiped them on her sleeve again.

“Next time we meet,” he began slowly, patiently. “I want you to greet me with a heart-felt apology,” he informed. “This is not optional.”

“I’m never coming to this shithole ever again!” she had declared, loud enough that the whole forest could witness her statement. She had meant it at the time—she couldn’t think very far into the future. Her mind had only been able to think of the swollen pain and heat radiating from her bottom.

His jaw had twitched, but then his lips curled into something that resembled a grin. “You need me a lot more than I need you,” he reminded confidently. “You’ll be back. Hopefully you’ll be a little wiser for ware when you do.” He pushed himself off the stone and trudged past her to his side of the river, leaving her to glare after him, soaked, sore, and insulted.

Now, three whole months later, she was not soaked or looking at all like a well-spanked brat. She held up her head high rolling her eyes to Moriarty. “Can you please go and explain to your master the fact that monopolies are illegal in all civilized countries and cultures, and pretty much only super-villains and the NFL are exempt?”

“He knows already,” Moriarty assured, shrugging. “He watches a LOT of CNN. Besides, we don’t live in a civilized country, Charlotte. Welcome to Otherworld,” he reminded, raising both hands to gesture to everything around him. “The rules here are largely created and enforced by the one-and-only Master Ashcroft, at least in this little plot of land we call home.” He laughed when he saw how angry she was becoming as he lectured her pedantically. “You know this, Sweet Lips. You shouldn’t have pissed him off. Picked up a book a manners or common sense, maybe.”

“Oh, I pissed him off, huh?” she countered, placing her hands firmly on her hips. “He’s the one that beat me, Fido.”

The ‘Fido’ landed—she could see him squint slightly. “He certainly could have beaten you if he’d wanted. Instead, he SPANKED you, which is more befitting for an ungrateful, talent-less whelp like yourself!”

“Oh, I’m an ungrateful whelp?” she snorted. “He’s making me destitute! Pretty soon all I’ll have left to pay him is my first born child!”

“Based on who your parents were,” Moriarty continued in a growl. “You’re lucky he trades with you at all. If you met me first, I would have gladly eaten you without question.”

“Eaten me?” she scoffed. Moriarty was just as likely to eat her as a Golden Retriever was. “You’d be more likely to have humped my leg!”

“One more dog joke, Sweet Cheeks, and I’ll…” he grumbled despite her grinning. She loved getting him upset—he looked likely to blow his lid.

“Or you’ll what? Go and piddle on the rug?” she continued.

He snarled at her.

“Don’t antagonize him,” Ashcroft’s thick, business-like voice said from the tree line. He appeared from the nearby and strolled into the river. “And you,” he said, pointing to Moriarty. “You know better than to talk to a lady that way.”

Moriarty turned his neck and looked down angrily at the ground, looking very chided, but not very sorry.

“Go on now,” Ashcroft said, nodding towards the tree line.

Moriarty’s face scrunched and he kicked the ground as he walked back up onto the bank. “Hopefully you just need the privacy to give her another sound thrashing,” he muttered.

Ashcroft just ignored him and settled his gaze on Charlotte. When Moriarty was out of sight, Ashcroft turned and looked squarely at her. “You know he doesn’t like pet jokes,” he lectured her. “They actually hurt his feelings.”

“That was the point,” she assured, looking as unremorseful as she could manage. “Thanks for telling him all the intimate details, by the way,” she said snidely.

“I barely even mentioned it to him. He has quite the imagination, though. If you don’t want to be spanked, Charlotte, I suggest you never do anything like that again.” He paused in his lecture and narrowed his eyes. “And I haven’t heard your apology yet.”

“That’s because you’re not gonna get one,” she informed. “But I’ll accept yours at anytime, Two-Face.” She delighted in the wince of pain he made when she called him that. He was so self-conscious about his four-hundred year old wound that she wouldn’t be surprised if he had stopped looking in mirrors all that time. She continued, “I hope it follows along the lines of apologizing for completely stepping over your bounds and making yourself a giant ass.”

He seemed incredulous, even shocked, at hearing that. It obviously wasn’t what he expected. Even after four years of trading with Charlotte, meeting with her every week, giving her a thousand lectures, tons of advice, and hundreds of hours of company, he still wasn’t used to the childish way she conducted herself with. He opened his mouth to lecture her, or maybe to threaten—it’s quite uncertain since he obviously thought better of it and calmed himself visibly by taking a deep, frustrated breath. “So you don’t want to trade, then, Brat?”

She ground her teeth together angrily. She HAD to trade—her life was too dangerous and too chaotic NOT to use magic, and she was too horrible of a witch, with no control of her powers, to even try to get on without potions. “No, I want to trade,” she grumbled, kicking the nearly-still water in the stream with her foot.

He raised his eyebrows, looking expectant.

“Are you serious?” she blanched, unable to believe that she actually had to apologize for making him spank her.

“And when you apologize, you will address me as master,” he added aloofly.

She physically refrained from laughing aloud, and knew that he could see it. When his eyes darkened, she stopped thinking it was so funny and felt rather insulted. “I don’t think so, Obi-Wan,” she sneered.

“You will call me master until you agree to marry me,” he directed crisply.

She groaned and put a hand over her eyes. “Oh, geez. Not this again…” He had proposed so many countless times that she wondered if he’d ever stop. He didn’t love her—he did nothing but snap at her and lecture her. Any affection that he showed her was not loving; it was more paternal than anything else.

“Charlotte, you need me as an ally. You need me to protect you,” he reminded firmly. “I’m tired of playing primary-school games with you.”

“You are my ally,” she said, straightening her shoulders, calling his bluff. “Be you a horribly grumpy, know-it-all, abusive ally…”

“I am stuck here in the Otherworld,” he reminded her grimly. “And I will remain here until you put that ring,” he pointed to a ruby ring that twisted intricately around her right hand’s ring finger, “on that finger.” He pointed to her left hand’s ring finger. “I am worthless to you, otherwise.”

She knew this. She could not enter the Otherworld beyond the Gates, and he could not enter the Earthside beyond the Gates, not unless they were married.

She looked at the ring and sighed. She put it on when she was eighteen and stupid and he gave it to her as if it was a had been a regular gift–like a scarf or a gift-card. Little did she know that she had put on an enchanted ring, which also meant she couldn’t get the ring off without the whole finger going. The only way she could get the ring off was if she actually meant to activate it by moving it to her ring finger… Somehow the ring would know her intentions, and it was far too clever to be fooled. She thought it was cute before all this, but since it had become a pain. The ring seemed to always snag on her favorite quilt, and didn’t match all of her outfits, it being adorned by a massive ruby.

“I’m dating someone right now,” she reminded, sounding prouder and prouder about it.

He stared at her blankly, looking exhausted by her games.

“Three months now,” she added sing-songishly. It was her first relationship EVER with ANYONE.

Still, he stared blankly at her.

“I can’t tell—is that look jealousy or… Anger? Or are you wondering if you left the oven on back home or something?” she griped mockingly, although she stepped away from him.

“When you’re afraid, you insult me. I’m trying to figure out where you think that will get you.” His tone was ominous, threatening. He pointed at the river floor in front of his feet. “Come here.”

She looked up and down the river, considering. “No.”

“Girl, you have about three seconds to come here and apologize to me, or you will apologize with a sore bottom. I don’t care if Moriarty hears, and he will, because I will spank you soundly.”

She blushed, surprised by how fast her throat constricted. “You’re a bully, Ashcroft,” she told him.

“One,” was all he said.

She scurried to fill the few feet that separated them, even though she would have far preferred scurrying in the other direction. “I’m sorry I stole from you,” she said quickly in an exasperated sigh.

His lips formed to say ‘three’, and she found herself wringing her hands on the front of his tunic desperately. “Master,” she panted, all the snark leaving her body in a rush, “please forgive me. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry..” She began to shiver harder than she was before, as if the closeness of him was making her even more chilled to the bone.

Her shoulders constricted after she’d made his apology, expecting him to laugh at her. She stared at his chest, ashamed at how chicken she was. But he cupped her chin in his rough hand and brought her eyes up to look at him. “If only you could get over my face, you wouldn’t be so frightened of me. And then you’d marry me.” He stroked her cheek soothingly with his thumb.

She felt like grimacing. She knew beauty was only skin deep. Still, even if his left side looked like his right, and he was handsome, she would still be shivering right now. “Your face isn’t the most frightening thing about you, Master Ashcroft,” she assured. “And I’m only twenty two–I’m too young for marriage, in any case.”

“When I was twenty-two I had three human children running around by my ankles,” he reminded her, patting her cheek softly before he dropped his arm.

She couldn’t imagine Ashcroft married to a human girl, having human children, pretending to be a human noble man. Every time he told her that he had been married several times already, her mind seemed to blank from the image.

“Those were different times,” she reminded. “Welcome to the twenty-first century. I can’t even keep a goldfish alive.”

“That’s because you’re still a child,” he reminded her, looking her up and down with a very hard expression. “I should have spanked you a thousand times in the last four years, but I didn’t even think you were mature enough to learn from it. I was wrong.”

She was embarrassed by this, and wished she hadn’t given into the fear of spanking so easily. She feared that him feeling a spanking would help her learn or listen was the beginning of a very ominous new relationship with him. “You’re not my father,” she reminded tersely.

He seemed to boil at the idea. His response became more and more snappish as he carried on, “No. Your father was overly kind to you and negligent. To me, he was overly conniving and wicked. Your parents did their worst with you—they sheltered you and hid you and didn’t teach you what you needed to know to defend yourself. They were fools. They left you in the wake of the storm and didn’t even have the decency to instill respect nor fear into you.”

Aschroft had been in dark moods before, but she had never actually seen him turn moods right in front of her. She had also heard him harangue the memory of her parents before. They were his enemies for centuries, after all… But he had never seemed so bitingly ferocious about it.

“Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

He locked his jaw with annoyance.

She was bent over his hip a moment later, and wondering how he’d gotten her into that position so easily. He was lighting into her bottom with his firm hand and kept her in place by curling his free arm tightly around her waist. He didn’t explain why he was doing this, except that she was beginning to fear, through her sharp whines and struggles, that spanking her had caused him gratification she normally didn’t allow him to feel.

He let her go just as quickly as he had grabbed her. She stumbled backwards, wheeling her arms around, but he caught her before she fell backwards into the water and let her regain her balance. She rubbed at her bottom.

“You will learn to talk civilly to me,” he told her. “And you listen to me, because I know your world better than you do. I want you to stop this foolish, ridiculous, inappropriate façade you share with your current boyfriend. You will relocate. You will change your name again. You will…”

“Inappropriate façade?” she coughed back.

He didn’t look like someone who believed he misspoke.

Tears began to swell up in her eyes. “I love Nathan! He treats me well. I’m happy for once…”

He gruffly took booth of her shoulders in his hand and gave her a firm shake. “Something evil is hanging over you, Charlotte. Caden will come after you; he will never rest. And I cannot protect you. You have to take precautions!”

Charlotte’s face dropped again, and he heard her sniffle. She did not cry easily. It shamed him to be harsh with her, and he tugged her to his body and held her there. He kissed her hair, breathing her in. “I’m sorry. I keep forgetting that you’re not spoiled, despite the whimsical way you act. Your problem is that you don’t know much happiness,” he admitted tenderly. “And you don’t understand how happy I could make you.”

“I like Nathan,” she said into his chest.

He rubbed her back with his hand. “When I gave you the ring, I hoped that you would come to love me, and put it on when you did. But I see that won’t happen; not that way. You will find yourself in a position you cannot get out of, and you will put it on so I might come rescue you. And I will… But you must keep yourself alive by the time I get there.”

She pulled gently out of his embrace and nodded. “I promise to be safe, Master.” She blushed as she said it—it sounded so odd, but she was rewarded when Ashcroft actually smiled… at least the corners of his mouth went up, which was a lot better than she had done the last four years. Still, she admitted, “But don’t hold your breath for me. I don’t wanna be married.”

He made a sound in his throat—almost a chuckle, as if he thought she was being ridiculous. He pulled a vial out of his satchel and put it into her hands. It was the elixir of Polaris she had stolen from him.

She wiped the tears from her eyes. “How much…” she began, put he put his hand up and silenced her.

“I was thinking after our last meeting that our relationship is very, very flawed. We are not on equal grounds. You are a young little witchling, and I am a Master Wizard. It is my duty and privilege to protect and guide you as long as you submit to me, whether you are my wife or not. It is my honor to provide gifts for you—not make trade after trade like some common merchant farmer.”

She looked down at the vial with confusion. “I should have let you spank me earlier,” she suddenly laughed, amazed that she didn’t have to trade the last of the gold she was able to scrounge together and buy with her measly paycheck.

“It’s not your position to let me do anything,” he informed sternly.

She wanted to protest that, but she was quite interested in riding this gravy-train for a couple of stops, at least. “Whatever you say, Master.”

“Your address of me needs to sound a little more comfortable on your tongue,” he chided, but she could tell he was happier with her than not. He pinched her cheek and turned to leave to his side of the bank. He turned his head just enough to call back. “I’ll see you in one week for the full moon. This is not optional.”

“Nothing’s EVER optional with you, Ash,” she snorted, turning to head up the river, though she didn’t walk very quickly. She had never been so late for a date with Nathan before, but she needed a little while to shake off the mix of emotions from her encounter. “Weird,” she muttered to herself, and put the vial into her pocket.

–So concludes Otherworldly Discipline, Version One, Draft One Written April 08, 2011. Remember to comment if you actually do want a second chapter. 😉

Alright, so this is mostly fictional, of course, because I’m not hallucinating quite yet. That being said, Otherworldly Discipline, Book Two: A Master’s Hand has been on my mind big-time this week, and I’m actually feeling a little guilty that I’ve put it off. Low book sales has made it somewhat of a low-priority for me, but I really miss the characters. Anyway–this is sort of what would happen if a character popped in from the Otherworld… Enjoy. -KMJ

I always have a suspicion, when a character writes itself too easily, that it’s going to have trouble letting itself go. Hard-to-write characters and I, you see, have a strained relationship by the end of a project. That’s why I stuck Thorton with a pregnant, mischievous nineteen-year-old wife and triplets at the end of the book… Trust me, he deserved what he got—good n’ hard.

Moriarty never gave me much grief. Oh, sure. He had loved to assure me that the only people wearing my shoes nowadays were hobos, and he was quite fascinated when I had the worst time deciding if he was Huxian or a werewolf—until he won the argument. He’s not a dog by any means, and I guess it was very insulting to be insinuated as such a few centuries ago.

Anyway, I finished Otherworldly Discipline well over a year ago now, and it’s been all quiet on the Western front. Oh, I dappled with a chapter or two back in October, but then I put it down and started to work on other things.

So, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised to see Moriarty on my computer last night. And I do mean on my computer. I walked in, and there he was—chocolate eyed and long-fingered, looking through my private folders while simultaneously drinking the last of my k-cup sampler tea and eating my last slice of lemon cake.

At first I thought he had wondered into the wrong apartment but then he looked over and grunted at me in that aloof manner that brought me back. Suddenly I realized who I was looking at. “Moriarty?”

Moriarty looked in my direction, finally. “You know,” he said in lieu of a greeting, his British accent so ridiculously thick and so deep that I was nearly aroused for a moment, “I fear you might have an addiction to pornography. I used to think it was myth, but I’m about to admit that I was actually wrong. I mean, what is this?” He pointed to the screen where two men were in compromising positions with a woman.

“Research,” I replied flippantly, trying not to let my absolute humiliation show. I leaned over his shoulder—I always forget how tall he is, so I had to reach—and shut off my monitor.

“You’ve certainly gotten more perverted since the last time I saw you,” Moriarty commented, arching one of his eyebrows judgmentally.

“And apparently far crazier!” I commented, aghast, throwing my purse in its proper corner. “By the way, I better only be imagining you eating that the last of the cake! I’ve been thinking about it non-stop—”

“Have you ever seen the film Fight-Club?” he answered me with, eating another bite.

I lifted a side of my lip with distaste. “…Yeah.”

“That’s what’s going on here, really,” he assured me, then put the empty plate in front of him and picked up his tea. “So, you’ll never get to enjoy that cake. Just let it go. I’ve come all the way here on important business.” With that, he crossed his long, long legs. He was taking up the whole room! He was actually quite intimidating—he was unquestionably larger than me, and I’ve always thought of myself as quite tall at 5’6’’. I stared at him; wondering why I never write about midgets.

“Is it about you being a praying mantis?” I asked, sitting in the chair opposite.

He frowned. “You’re not very funny, you know.” He sat up then steadily leaned back; now he was the one assessing me. “The sad thing is that you think you are… It really only comes across as rude and pathetic.”

“Thanks. I needed that ego-boost,” I grumbled, then decided to get up and make coffee. Maybe he’d just disappear… “Why are you here?” I asked. “Last I saw you, I was giving you a sixteen-year vacation between book one and book two. Haven’t you had a gaggle of kids with Alice?”

He gave a laugh. “It would have been a gaggle by now, but after having Cole, we both decided a ten-year breather was essential.”

I grinned mischievously. “You know I thought about giving you quintuplets or something like that.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he replied, swirling his tea. “You’re sadistic in nature. But see here,” he suddenly said, straightening his back, “I haven’t come to have a tea-party with you, Korey, I—!”

Moriarty thinks he’s The Shit with too much hair-product and the fact that he’s got flawless skin, but let me tell you–he’s a dominant man with a hand of steel. He’s also a warrior… But Huxians are fox-shifting tricksters with a pension for seducing virgins and mischief… Or seducing mischievousness virgins… So beware.

I shrugged, “Then why are you drinking tea?”

“Because I’ve been drinking tea for the last seven centuries, as you know quite well! It’s what people from a more sophisticated time and a more sophisticated country do!” I snorted. Springing from a long line of Irish Pub owners that opened its doors early in the morning, I could still say that none of my relations have ever been to his level of ‘sophistication’—not a one of us tea-drinkers. “Now stop being cheeky and avoiding the subject!” he growled at me. “Ashrcroft is gone.”

“What do you mean gone?” I asked, figuring he was only being dramatic. I was fussing with my Keurig, wondering if the K-cup in it was fresh or not. “He’s off fucking some chick, right?”

“No,” Moriarty grumbled. “That’s what he was doing ten years ago. It isn’t right what you’ve done to him! He’s gone absolutely mad, Korey! He’s not trying to forget Charlotte anymore! Last I checked, he was wallowing about, gone completely ‘round the bend, and beginning to think Charlotte was far, far more perfect that she was. You and I both know that she was sort of a twit.”

“Really? I always thought, of all my characters, she was the most like me,” I replied, then looked up and saw Moriarty shaking his head at me.

“That would explain a lot,” Moriarty huffed.

My mouth dropped. “You liked Charlotte!”

“She was tolerable, I suppose,” he replied breezily. “Certainly, I’m not the one that threw her off a cliff, killing her.” He made it sound like it was me who’d done it and not Lachlan, the story’s villain.

I pursed my lips, wondering what I should divulge. “Charlotte… might not be dead.”

And that’s why I have tea stains in my carpet this morning. Moriarty spit it out everywhere. It was a mess. “What?” he demanded, not sounding happy about it at all. “Do you know how far she fell? It was a long drop—we’re not talking a puddle-hop. We’re talking over a hundred feet! Lachlan’s body washed up…”

I looked over my kitchen counter. Was that a stain? I licked my thumb and scrubbed at it. It was definitely preferable to looking right at Moriarty when he was in one of these moods.

“Korey?” When I looked up, he wasn’t sitting in his chair. I turned, and he right there next to me, staring down at me.

Damn it he was tall. For some reason, I ran out of spit and air. I just sputtered, “Ye… hm?” and fluttered my eye lashes, thinking that innocent people do that all the time.

He narrowed his eyes at me and I took a step back. He took a step forward, saying, “What aren’t you telling me? You’ve got that I-need-a-good-whipping look about you.”

I took another step back and found myself trapped in the corner of countertop. “It’s possible…” I wheezed, “that… Lachlan’s not dead, either.”

He didn’t move at all, didn’t twitch, didn’t blink.

“I… There might have been sorcery involved. He… Had sort of been taking up… two bodies at the time of his death to take over the Otherworld with an army of…”

He still wasn’t blinking.

“Anyway… Charlotte’s sort of changed form because she was rescued by a demi-god named Hoel, who sort of adopted her since she had no memories of anything that happened, and he wanted to protect her from whoever tried to execute her… And it’s possible that… She eventually gets… married by proxy to a warlord… who is actually…” I swallowed. It’s hard to swallow when there’s no spit in your mouth! “Lachlan.”

He finally nodded and blinked, only very quickly. “Alright,” he sighed, his voice quite rumbly, “I’m going to give you a five-second head start.”

I felt sweat perspire on the back of my neck. “Before what?” I asked.

“Four seconds,” he warned. “Three…”

I wasted nearly a whole two seconds just getting around his leering form without full on body-checking him into the kitchen counter like a hockey-star. I probably could have gotten all the way to the mail box before he caught me if I had two more seconds—I was absolutely flying down those stairs leading up to my apartment’s front door.

No idea in hell how he caught me so easily; I had to have been moving at Olympic speeds reserved for people who are trying to escape Grizzly bears (and, of course, the actual Olympics). Then again, I suppose he was only one second behind and his legs are way longer than mine… And leg-span makes a definite difference, let no mistakes be made on that account!

“I think you should really let me explain further,” I was puffing after he’d caught me from around my stomach, yanked me back (I could have gotten whip-lash!), and tilted me over his shoulder.

It was not comfortable at all! Moriarty’s shoulder’s not bony, by any means, but I could feel his collar digging right into my guts, especially as he climbed the stairs. I was trying to find a place to grab onto that wouldn’t result in him dropping me, though, because that would have been even more painful. I grabbed my arms around his chest, secured on the front by his arm around my knees. “Why? What more complications could you possibly add?” he demanded. “Why can’t you write a normal, linear story like everyone else? You know, they hate each other, like each other, there’s some conflict they come over, then they marry? Then end it.”

He dropped me unceremoniously on my bed. “You know James will be home any second!”

He pulled a pocket watch out of his coat, as if he wanted to prove that he was even more disgustingly British than I originally wrote him as. “If any second means in five hours. Besides, you think he’ll disagree with anything I do? Pull down whatever you call those.” He pointed at my pants.

I locked my jaw firmly as I wiggled my way to the edge of the bed. “I’m not taking off my pants, Moriarty. You have to deal with it. I’m your author!”

He was listening as was taking off his belt.

“I’m your author!” I repeated, my voice getting more screechy. “You do what I tell you to! And you can’t spank me! I get spanked enough by James from being… you know…” Instead of crawling to the edge of the bed, I was now trying to crawl away from him.

“A brat?” he finished.

“I’m not a brat!” I just speak like one to James sometimes. I have a tendency to get very defensive at the drop of a hat. Like right that second—I never said the right thing when I was defensive. It was as if my brain stops functioning… Probably because it’s too busy thinking up reasons why something in particular isn’t my fault.

He grabbed my ankle just as I had turned my body to hop off the other side of my mattress… The side of the bed closest to the balcony. I was thinking I could go through there, round back into the living room’s porch-entrance, and then make it to the front door, make it to the garage, speed away to the airport, and fly to China.

He grabbed my ankle before I even made it off the bed. “What about Alice?” I squealed, trying to kick him off.

Apparently, he’d been given permission to beat the snot out of me if he wanted to. “You’re lucky she’s not here to hold you down. You’ve given her three insane children in the last sixteen story-years. Do you think she can’t wield a mean paddle by now?”

Good point. “You’re not understanding how Charlotte’s character will develop by the end of Book Two! So, so much development!” Moriarty was now pinning me to the bed with his body, reaching around my front and trying to get my jeans unbuttoned and unzipped. By then, I was planning to do way more weight-lifting at the gym. Was I always this puny?

“You have no regard for my Master,” he gritted in my ear. He yanked my pants and panties violently to my knees. “His bride is out there—married to his evil brother, no less—and he’s been drinking himself into oblivion and not taking care of any of his responsibilities! And you still haven’t given a care to where he’s gone!”

Grabbing my bottom, which was being hauled down so it neatly pent over the bed, I said, “Don’t worry about him! He’s probably just looking for her! And he’ll totally, totally find her and she’ll be better than she ever was!”

“Sixteen years!” he snapped at me. I don’t think my promise for a HEA had sunk in yet. “Stick your ridiculous little ass into the air, Korey.”

“This is a bit of an overreaction!” I cried, for some reason down-playing his reaction. “What about the art? The art!”

“Alright, let me ask you this,” he riddled. “In this art of yours, how will Ashcroft react when he learns that his brother has been taking liberties with Ashcroft’s woman?”

I could have lied, I understand. I could have told Moriarty that Ashcroft was going to be totally cool when things started to unravel towards the end, but the man’s gonna lose it. I haven’t written it, no, but I knew that much. But it wasn’t my fault—Lachlan’s evil. This was just the way things were. “It’s possible that he’ll throw her out on her hind-end. But he won’t know she’s Charlotte—she probably won’t know she’s Charlotte yet by then!”

“Probably?” he seethed.

…Are authors not allowed to use the world ‘probably’ when it comes to plot-description? I haven’t decided yet! I was going to cross that bridge when I came to it!

The belt struck as silent as a snake—I expected whooshing, and I get the belt all the time. I keep forgetting the way it silently bites into your ass, making a loud smacking sound only upon impact… A really loud smacking sound that the neighbors would surely have heard if they hadn’t moved out last week. “Jesus!” I hissed. The stroke was so serious! “Fuck, Moriarty! Give me a break—ouch!” He wouldn’t even give me a break between strokes! He was striking my poor bottom like he was on a schedule!

One stroke fell and then another, and another! I was trying desperately to get up or turn around, but he had me, and my wrists, pinned behind my back in a very uncomfortable way that made me feel like my shoulders were going to be killing me all night long.

“Moriarty! You’re hurting me!” I informed him in a no-laughing manner.

“Good, you little… I don’t even know how to describe you! You’re a silly, silly woman who apparently needs a red bottom to write thirteen miserable chapters of a book! How has it taken you nearly seventeen months?” I heard him hiss as he continued to wail on me. “It’s worse that you know what the plot is—even though you’ve made it a complicated jumble!”

“I’ve been working on other projects!” I claimed, feeling rattled and even a little desperate. “I’ve published three books since then! One was really long!”

Damn Thorton. It was HIM who’d made me take forever on Learning to Blush! Oh! Oh in Swarii Brides, Three, I am going to give Thorton another set of triplets, so help me God! “And I’ve had a full-time job. And cover art. And I started my own company! And all these websites!”

“I was on your computer all day before you’ve gotten back! You never write five words when five hundred will do! You rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Personally, I don’t think rewriting makes it any better!”

Said the non-werewolf. It was him who’d made me rewrite the first half of Otherworldly twenty times… Okay, that was Charlotte’s fault.

Another belt stripe echoed through the room, this one was followed by a white-flash of pain. I swear my eyes nearly turned inside out. “Fuck! Not there!” Not my sit-spot! Not with the belt!

Alas; Moriarty was in a punishing mood. Maybe Ashcroft had driving him and his buddying family insane with all of his brooding and going mad. So, it was as if I was hanging a billboard that said, ‘Sit-Spot: Where you want to be!’ with a little red arrow pointing at that area.

“Please! Moriarty! Please stop!” I begged, panting and shuddering. I hated to beg Moriarty—it was like going up to a vampire and exposing your jugular. It was only going to get worse.

For a second, the pain stopped. In response, the skin on my bottom crawled and my body shuddered. “Don’t get too relaxed. There are still white spots left,” he warned in my ear, “so you’d better tell me what I want to hear right quick.”

“Merry-go-rounds!” I yelped. “Merry-go-rounds, lollipops, and noodle salad! That’s what’s going to be in the next book! A giant tea-party like that one drawing scene in Mary Poppins!”

I think he thought I was being cheeky. I wasn’t—I really wanted to say what he wanted to hear. Unfortunately, due to a blatant mis-interpretation on his end, my bottom suffered for it. I felt a firm ‘slap’ hit my flank and puffed out a cry of air, unable to actually produce sound.

“No, no—” I couldn’t believe a hand-spanking could be quite that hard. Which is saying something because my husband’s hand feels like wood. I think the big difference here is that Moriarty had huge, gigantic hands. Also, there wasn’t the possibility of make-up sex. Anyway—he also spanked in a way that made me think he wanted me to asphyxiate. He didn’t let me catch my breath, he just filled the room with fleshy slaps as I continued to scream, “Stop! Stop!” Until my voice got hoarse… Which happened quite quickly.

“You’re such a baby,” Moriarty snapped. “Nobody cries this loud on the planet.”

I just made a dry sobbing noise.

He sat down on the bed next to me. I felt his weight shift the mattress. “So,” he began. It was odd to have to listen to a lecture at the end. James, you see, does it before he starts spanking. “I’m not going to let you talk much here, since you’re so bad at it and you’re only going to get yourself more bottom-smacking. This is what you’re going to do, though… Firstly, I don’t know where Ashcroft is but I’m worried. I want you to fish him out of wherever he is and bring him home in one piece. Secondly, you’re going to finish our adventure by Summer. Do you know when Summer starts?”

I gurgled, wondering if even HE could feel the heat from my surely-bruised bottom from where he was sitting.

He patted the small of my back and said, “That’s June twenty-first, poppet.”

“I have a book to do before that!” I grumped.

“I know,” he assured, “that’s why it’s not due in May.”

“You can’t impose deadlines!”

“There are some nice welts here that state otherwise,” he said, surely gesturing at my bottom. “Do they need some company?”

“No!” I cried immediately. “Dear lord, no!”

“Brilliant!” he said cheerfully, giving me another (unnecessarily hard) smack on my bottom as he popped up onto his feet, leaving me groaning. “Put on a skirt and get to it!” He picked up his belt and strapped it back on himself.

“I’m not going to wear skirts, Moriarty,” I groaned, trying to peel myself off the bed so I could relocate some shards of my dignity. “So give it up.”

“Absolutely no,” he refused and walked into my closet. I was finally pulling my rough jeans and thin panties back up when I heard from the closet a cry of, “Dear Lord!” He came out again, looking shell-shocked. “Are you a hobo?”

I didn’t give him any sort of response. I just glared at him and buttoned my pants.

“Seriously, Tim Gunn would just walk in there, take one look, and torch the damn thing.” He put up his finger just as I opened my lips to retort and added firmly, “Watching style shows and knowing who Tim Gunn is has absolutely no bearing on my sexual orientation.”

“I wasn’t going to make a gay joke,” I lied, like I was far to mature to ever make one about a man who wears pink far more often than the average male… Or the average female, for that matter. “I was just wondering why you’re still around after issuing your orders at me like I was the pimple-faced kid in the McDonald’s drive through.”

He grinned at me, showing one of his fangs—it was his real give-away that he wasn’t entirely human.

“I thought we were going to do what we used to do together,” Moriarty said with a shrug. “Sit around and make fun of the people and on the telly, simultaneously watching reality shows while judging anyone who’d ever actually go on one…”

I actually smirked, which was actually something I thought I wouldn’t do again with the way my ass was throbbing. “What are you trying to avoid at home?” I asked, knowing that he’d only drawl out time with me to avoid something else.

He grinned sheepishly, “There’s this parent-teacher nonsense at Cole’s school that I told Alice I didn’t think I’d be able to make,” he admitted.

I squared my shoulders and said, “Let me get this straight—you come in here, lecture me, spank me, threaten me, give me impossible deadlines, and then I’m also supposed to just chill with you on the couch for a few hours wasting time and smoking weed with you?”

He gave a nod. “Yes,” he said, although I think his tone admitted that he knew he was being very fickle, selfish, and contrary.

I pursed my lips and thought about this for a long moment. Moriarty is a total ass, but man-oh-man—he can be as fun and as funny as hell…

“Fine, just never speak of the spanking you gave me or the cellulite on my ass ever again.”

“I haven’t even begun to speak about the dimples on your ass,” he replied with a suave grin.

“I hate you,” I sighed.

“You hate and love me like you hate and love yourself,” Moriarty said. He was quoting Tolkein, of course, but it rung especially true right now.

A great lament of mine is the fact that if I LOVE alpha-male fiction in romance. I love BDSM. But if I want to find a good alpha male who’s trying to get his woman to submit, I have to look elsewhere. I know I can’t have it here, so I leave the reservation, looking into the great wide world of Romance. I tend to go into Paranormal Romance, hoping to get some ass-kicking.

Ass kicking? What are you, Korey? Some sort of blood-lusted action-movie, testosterone-ridden she-male?

I don’t think so. Actually, when it comes to movies, I don’t like too much action. I think it detracts from the story there. Why? Because they only have 2 hours to tell a story and something’s gonna get cut. I can’t watch horror movies, either. They give me nightmares.

Teatime is fun, that’s why the Brits have one every day. I don’t like it to take up the whole novel, is all.

With novels, we have as much time to tell a story as we need to take. So, I feel in that case, an action scene, or even violent imagery, can help ground a story. It can help make a character seem darker, more real. It can make the stakes a little higher. Sometimes one action scene can take the place of a MILLION tea-times.

Tea-time is what I call two the hero and the heroine matching a battle of wits… the entire novel. Around the coffee table. Sure, maybe tea’s not being served, but that doesn’t mean it’s not tea-time. When I used to play a lot of Muds, Moos, and Muxs (those are online text-based roleplay games), we used to complain about them a lot. There were those who wanted to stir the pot and get the “plot” moving through action and drama, and then there were the people who just wanted to sit around and chat about the craziness outside their virtual walls.

The same rule applies in novels. Some people want to shake the shit out of a plot and go crazy with it, bringing in action and violence, and making “the stakes” really high. Others… Just aren’t interested. Did you ever read the Twilight Series and decide that out of all four books, Breaking Dawn was your favorite of them? You’re a tea drinker. You’re fine, you have your place–you and I just don’t like the same books, is all. For me, I like to hold my breath while reading a novel.

For example, I just finished reading “Shadow’s Claim” by Kresley Cole. After that, I broke down and read “Poison Princess” as well, even though I knew it was going to be a cliff hanger that was going to put me in that limbo of waiting for the sequel forever and ever.

Shadow’s Claim wasn’t Kresley’s best book, but it was much better than 99.9% of books I’ve read, anyway. Let’s just say that the main character kills countless people in the course of the novel via beheadings, violent melees, one-via-one combat, and that’s not where the tension ends. The main character is tortured by winged warriors known as Vrekeners in the very first chapter. The book’s violent.

Poison Princess was a young adult novel that… is the most violent and deliciously action-packed young adult novel I’ve ever read. Let’s just say that if they ever do a miniseries, it will have to be on HBO because it’s gonna be rated R even without too many sexual overtones (that miniseries would rock my world, by the way. C’mon, HBO!!). I mean, four chapters are told from the POV of a man who wants to cut up the main character and put her body pieces into jars. There’s battles, and archery, and car crashes, and zombie-killing–one scene after another. The book was slathered with awesome sauce.

Still, these stories more than made up for it. The violence and chaos in the story thrust the characters together to make their bond even stronger, even more believable, and even legendary.

Alright, so you like erotica with that sort of violence?! WTF? You get turned on by that stuff?

Dangerous situations, scenarios, and histories can sometimes be implemental in making your character fascinating… And super hawt.

No, it doesn’t turn me on. There’s another fallacy:

A ROMANCE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE ROMANTIC THE WHOLE WAY THROUGH.

You know after you’re done camping, you come home, take an INCREDIBLY long shower, and then your food tastes sooo good and you feel soo clean? Well, violence and action is camping–you make your characters rough it, go through dramatic scenes that strengthen their character and then when there is sex or spanking, you are SO hungry for it, and MAN do you appreciate it. You have to let your reader fret and worry about the main characters.

As Marquis deSade said: It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure. Remember to spice it up; make your characters earn each other, earn themselves, and earn the reader! Bring pain to all, so everyone can get more pleasure from it!

Like dolphins, in college we lived in “Pods”–groups of twenty-two women sharing 11 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, on one floor. It was a good time–I had an AWESOME roommate, who must have been very patient (for not smothering me to death in the middle of the night. I still had night-terrors at that point, so sometimes I would wake up screaming, and she was STILL cool), we had a good view of the smokers’ hut from there (where all the drama was going down in the whole 5,000-student college), we were very unfortunately close to the 24-hour cafeteria so I gained the entire “freshman fifteen” that year, and in the winter we all went two weeks without hot water.

But what hangs in my mind the MOST was the penises.

Big ones, small ones, veiny ones, hairy ones, mostly all of them were completely deformed, and they all came in different colors. These penises were scrawled about the U-Shaped hallway in a mural form similar to the cavemen dwellings–if the cavemen were obsessed with pubic hair.

Copyright Bigstock / Taigi

There were unused human-shaped dildos proudly protruding all over the bathrooms like proud statues. There was even a penis mask. A couple of girls dressed as penises for Halloween–one was strangely a lesbian.

Maybe that’s why I’m scared to death of them. It was enough to give a girl a complex, after all.

It’s not that I don’t like James’ penis, I do. But I still get a little squeamish when he’s walking around naked–which he almost never does; he doesn’t even walk around in his chonies. Why? The penis. It’s intimidating.

Here’s why–I almost envision the penis a complete detachment of a man’s body. Like a wrist-watch. A forbidden wrist-watch. Or a pet. a FORBIDDEN pet. Because not in any picture or sculpture of the many penis depictions I had scene had there ever been a man attached to it. Men themselves treat it like something that thinks and acts on its own accord, very unlike my vagina. So when a penis gets involved in a sexual situation, it makes me go, “Well, and hello to you, too.”

Because of this, I find it impossible to write about them. I have literally found myself stealing discriptions. “Oh,” I think while reading. “Mushroom head… mushroom head. Yes. Pulsing member? ALRIGHTY.” Then I read diatribes like this:

“…Last night they’d been in the shower together, his manhood had been splendid. Erect, it was mouthwatering. She knew from last night that he’d grow so slick along that wide head…” -Kresley Cole, Dark Deeds at Night’s Edge

Kresley Cole’s always doing that. Making the penis not sound scary, unlike me. Normally when I write about a penis I slap down the ‘vague’ card while still treating it like it’s a sort of evil villain, and the heroine has no idea what’s coming to her:

She moaned, and as she did, he felt himself ache with lust. He nearly began to wonder if he was going to be spent before he got started. He kissed down to her belly button and then met her lips again and reached his hand down to finish undoing his pants. He quickly succeeded in freeing himself and placed his member on top of her mound.

She nibbled on his lip and he massaged her untouched folds with his member, hoping to lubricate himself before he entered her. It was easy enough—she was young, innocent, and probably had no idea that he was stroking her with this part of his anatomy, BUT she was also very ripe for the picking.

He put himself at her entrance and looked into her eyes before he shoved himself inside of her with a slight grunt. Although he had barely entered her—she was so breathtakingly tight—her eyes widened with a look of betrayal and her mouth took on the shape of a perfect “O” even before she made any sounds of protest. Her look only made him more eager to place himself deeper inside of her. He held onto her waist as she quickly tried to squirm herself away from him, firmly keeping her groin pressed to his own even though she gave a sharp scream and kept wiggling desperately.

“Ek! Admiral! Stop! Stop! It hurts!” she cried as she struggled to squirm away from him, but he responded only by thrusting into her until he was all the way inside of her. She pinched her eyes together and gave a sharp moan. “It hurts, it hurts!” she continued to cry.

Ironically enough, in the same moment, Logan had never felt better in his life and as she whined, he groaned happily before he withdrew himself so that he could thrust deep inside of her again, extracting another cry from her lips. He reached down with one hand and stroked within her folds, above her entrance as he continued slamming his length into her again and again.

She wrapped her arms and legs around his body to hold herself closer to him, which did not make pleasuring her easy for Logan, but she seemed to hope that if she was close enough to him, he couldn’t thrust into her as deeply.

She held onto his neck with both arms, feeling completely overwhelmed with Logan’s purposeful looks and groans, the pain in her loins, and the slight tingling in her nipples. It was in her most overwhelmed moment that she felt her own loins seem to clench hungrily onto Logan’s flesh, and with a loud moan her hips betrayed her and let her fall back onto the bed while she bucked wildly against him, causing his member to go in and out of her violently.

With her tightness now clenching onto him like a vise, he felt he couldn’t hold onto himself any longer, and pressed his cheek onto Renny’s as she moaned, feeling his member contract and pulse wildly inside of her. Feeling as if he was too large for her as it was, his rapid engorgement made her groan and lock her jaw in response to the sharp pain. He breathily groaned as he released himself into her, spilling his seed deep inside her young, virgin body. Finally, she no longer felt like he was ripping her apart.

They held onto each other afterwards, panting tiredly. “You said…” she finally whined with a dry, hurt voice. “That you wouldn’t hurt me.”

“I said no such thing,” Logan replied simply. “I said, ‘Does this hurt?’ You probably should have regarded it, in fact, as a complete change in topic.” He kissed her neck and began to murmur explanations for his treachery. “I couldn’t tell you it would hurt, my honey, because you wouldn’t relax, and it was hard enough entering you without your muscles clenching with fear and apprehension.” He nibbled on her neck slightly, then looked down and with a groan, pulled out of her. She responded by breathing a sigh of relief and comfort. ” –Korey Mae Johnson, Pursuit of Glory

and so I went to research the best ways to make it sound in my writing like it could LOOK good as much as it could FEEL good. It’s hard to write, and so I felt I needed a field-guide to help me figure out the right wording while I worked on my own cock-worship, trying to get the organ to not seem so damn intimidating.

I found this. It’s sort of like a training-wheels guide to writing the penis, something to build off of.

Excerpted from “Sex in the Romance: A Review of Romantic Encounters of the Close Kind”. (copyright John L. Ferri 1994, jlferri@epix.net)

Aching bulge

aching shaft

arousal

aroused flesh

blatant, aggressive, magnificent arousal

bulging erection

burgeoning erection

eagerness

engorged flesh

engorged manhood

erect manhood

erect rod

erection

evidence of his arousal

evidence of his own instant arousal

fiery brand

firm flesh

full throbbing erection

fullness

growing arousal

growing erection

hard male heat

hard male loins

hard pulse of his arousal

hard shaft

hardness

hardness of his arousal

hardness of his sex

hardness to his loins

his driving need

his sex

hot, bulging shaft

hot distended flesh

hot flesh

hot swollen flesh

hotness

iron-hard tumescence

loins

love’s sweet arrow

male member

malenes

manhood

masculinity

molten member

phallus

plenipotentiary instrument

pulsating manhood

pulsing core

rapidly growing erection

rigid flesh

rigid part of him

rigid shaft

rigid source of heat

rigidity

rock hard

rod

shaft

sinewy length of him

stirring manhood

straining erection

straining masculinity

straining sex

straining shaft

swelling in his loins

swollen flesh

swollen manhood

swollen member

swollen staff

thick hardness

throbbing erection

throbbing hardness

throbbing manhood

throbbing shaft

throbbing hardness

thrusting hardness

thrusting possession

torrid extension

turgid shaft

virile masculinity

I hope that helps any one who has penis-discombobulation like I do, but please let me know if you have any favorite examples from books you’ve read in the comments with awesome penis-descriptions!